In regards to news aggregators, Matthew Eberle cruelly teases me with the following:

"I still like NewsIsFree, but I'm looking into Sitescooper to dump news sites, including RSS to Palm's DOC format."

I'm sorry, my dear boy, but you simply can't throw that sentence out into my aggregator without further explanation! I need details, lad, details! What exactly does it mean when you say "dump news sites, including RSS?" Are you able to duplicate some of the content from your aggregator on your Palm through synchronization? And this software is free?!

Because to me, that's the next logical step - mobile aggregation, especially as we move into the world of high-speed, always-on wireless connections. Here's what the Sitescooper site has to say:

"Sitescooper automatically retrieves the stories from several news websites, trims off extraneous HTML, and converts them into formats you can read on your Palm computing device for later reading on-the-move. It maintains a cache, and will avoid stories you've already read. It can handle 1-page sites, 1-page with diffing, 2-level and 3-level sites, and it's very easy to add a new site to its list.

Even if you don't have a Palm handheld, it's still handy for simple website-to-text conversion, and offline HTML reading. For example, here's some screenshots of an iPaq displaying sitescooper output....

Included in the bundle are site files for Slashdot, NTKnow, BluesNews, Linux Weekly News, Wired News BBC News, TBTF, Hacker News Network, Robot Wisdom weblog, Memepool, Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox, Ars Technica, I, Cringely, Kernel Traffic, Linux Today, comp.risks, and over 300 more."

Help!

A second note about news aggregators: Joe Gregorie continues to make progress on his home-rolled aggregator, called Aggie. He has lots of interesting ideas about aggregators, so I'm tracking this one.

Netscape 7: Nice, but I'll Stay with IE. Here's Why

"THE BEST NEW FEATURE in Netscape 7--new for Netscape, at least, but apparently lifted from the Opera browser--is a tabbed user interface that allows easy switching from one open Web page to another. You can, for example, create bookmarks that open a specific set of tabs; I used one such bookmark to open all the pages I use for reading the news each morning with a single click. These tabs sit just below the menu bar and are a nice feature, though not turned on by default." [ZDNet AnchorDesk]

Get out - David Coursey doesn't use a news aggregator?? He's still surfing manually? Someday should show him the light.